American Blue: Selected Poems

Elizabeth Alexander is a leading American poet whose work has been inspired by a wide range of influence, from history, literature, art and music to the ‘rich infinity’ of the African-American experience. Hers is a vital and vivid poetic voice on race, gender, politics and motherhood. American Blue is her first British publication.

Many of her poems bring history alive and singing into the present in highly musical, sharply contemporary narratives which use many different forms and voices to cover subjects ranging from slave rebellions, the Civil Rights movement, Muhammed Ali and Toni Morrison to the lives of jazz musicians and the ‘Venus Hottentot’, a 19th-century African woman exhibited at carnivals.

‘Alexander has an instinct for turning her profound cultural vision into one that illuminates universal experience’

– Clarence Major

‘In narratives sweetened by the lyric pulse and pierced through by felicitous turns of irony, Alexander chronicles the world of “black and tan”. Her poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh. Race is present in her poems in the way that sex, class, age, even weather are present in all of our lives’

– Rita Dove, Washington Post